Ah, MySpace, I think I made thousands of custom MySpace themes, hacking their complete lack of html escaping to change the layout. I wonder if they'd stil allow that same level of jankiness
My first paid software gig was making a famous person's MySpace page. I got my first software job because of this. So I have a real soft spot for MySpace.
Be careful with this site, the footer on each page claims "no tracking" but it's very chatty to it's "engagement" backend with some odd looking numbers included.
POST https://allthedamn.tools/api/pa/event
{"n":"pageview","v":36,"u":"https://allthedamn.tools/myspace-profile-generator/","d":"allthedamn.tools","r":"https://news.ycombinator.com/"}
{"n":"engagement","sd":93,"d":"allthedamn.tools","u":"https://allthedamn.tools/","e":32684,"v":36}
{"n":"engagement","sd":100,"d":"allthedamn.tools","u":"https://allthedamn.tools/myspace-profile-generator/","e":2983,"v":36}
Every page is already a GET call so if they want metrics on which tools are being used they can use the server access logs but they're choosing to use this extra layer of engagement tracking for some reason.
The CloudFlare Insights beacon is enabled too. Redacted the page load IDs and timings.
POST https://allthedamn.tools/cdn-cgi/rum?
{"resources":[],"referrer":"https://allthedamn.tools/gif-maker/","eventType":1,"firstPaint":[REDACTED],"firstContentfulPaint":[REDACTED],"startTime":[REDACTED],"versions":{"fl":"2024.11.0","js":"2026.6.0","timings":1},"pageloadId":"[REDACTED]","location":"https://allthedamn.tools/word-counter/","nt":"navigate","timingsV2":{"nextHopProtocol":"h3","transferSize":16584,"decodedBodySize":98788},"dt":"","siteToken":"[REDACTED]","st":2}
The privacy policy claims these are "privacy-friendly analytics"
The favicon also has an odd cache policy "max-age=0" so if you're clicking within a tool that uses #anchor such as the Time Zone Tool each click with a different #anchor triggers a call to this favicon.
GET https://allthedamn.tools/favicon.svg
304 Not Modified
cache-control: public, max-age=0, must-revalidate
I can see why people might want it to come back, but I don't think bringing it back will bring back the good old days.
Much of that was made the early web less shit was people being more mentally stable by having most of their social interactions happen for real offline, rather than clinging like Harlow's monkey to a simulacrum of togetherness mediated via a screen like we do today.
What people want back is the crazy innovation of getting every one of your friends' updates unless you have intentionally muted them, in chronological order. It was also nice to decorate your page. Made it yours.
The good old days were when social media wasn't a thing. There was a gap between MySpace and Facebook circa 2007 where neither was popular for my age range, I guess cause only older people used MySpace.
I roasted MySpace hard back in the day, but now I kind of miss it. I was all too happy to move over to Facebook and leave MySpace behind.
For me, the exodus from MySpace to Facebook marks the inflection point were smaller internet communities died and were replaced with services from megacorps.
At the time, MySpace was an echo of free homepage sites on providers like AngelFire and Geocities. My friend group had moved over to MySpace from a custom site our friend hosted on a server in his living room. His web site did pretty much everything that MySpace did, MySpace just did it better.
I don't want MySpace back, but I do want some of the cool interactive content back that seems to all but have died out.
Strangely, I kinda see it being the first thing where "everyone must get into".
Before that, the web was a mishmash of communities, websites, shops and services. Even instant messengers were way more open and utilitarian, and more like Email: I would use Odigo, Adium or whatever, to use ICQ, AOL, etc. And you just talked with your internet friends.
But when MySpace launched, it was a strange situation where you needed an account, otherwise you weren't seen as "cool" by people you knew from non-online spaces. I was in my 20s and in bands, so not having one was just unacceptable.
After that, there would be those "migrations" where "normies" would follow. Using Email, ICQ or AOL wasn't seen as cool, so you should go to MSN. Myspace wasn't cool anymore, so you had to go to Facebook. And so on and so on. Even techies got into it: having a Hotmail instead of Gmail was seen as a bad thing... and so on.
Can you tell me more about that? The cool interactive content. I'd love to hear more details about your experience and what you miss.
For me the main thing I miss is Flash. I know there's Ruffle as Flashplayer replacement but the culture around Flash (and most of the authoring tools) has basically died.
(I talked to a bunch of Flash animators I knew back in the day and every single one was surprised to hear that Flash is still available, they just changed the name. Big fail on Adobe's part...)
As for the cute 90s and 2000s web designs, have you seen NeoCities? That spirit is alive and well there :)
The other thing I miss is that everyone would put their email in their form signature and you could just add everyone on MSN. People were super chill in those days, I made a lot of friends that way.
Nowadays the only unsolicited messages I get are from people trying to sell me something.
I'm not a regular user atm, when I used it my experience was great, and the owner is a really nice guy. I vaguely remember him scrambling to update on Twitter when the servers where down while he was at uni etc. For a free service that was exploding in users when he was swamped with other stuff, he always did his utmost to fix things ASAP. So yeah, sign up today and buy merch! You may not end up using the site much but it's for a good cause that sparks joy. And while of course there's also spammers or jerks, there are also lots of nice people to be found there.
Today we have no social networks. Zuckerberg has turned Facebook into.. frankly I don't even know what it is. But it's not about getting updates from your friends.
instagram took that place but he fucked that one up too by mutating it into a cheap tiktok clone instead.
Social networks are now just influencer/media produced slob to be consumed by the masses. A Youtube with shorter clips.
It's not an actual social network where you could find out what your friends are up to
They can try to bring back something resembling the MySpace experience, but they can't bring back the millions of songs they deleted in 2018 with no backup. That was a great crime against modern music history.
Isn't the internet a social network? Get a website. put vacation photos up. no ads. use AI to add chat, messaging, blogging, discussion forums, and a web ring. why do things like facebook/myspace exist at all?
How would this be any better than Facebook? I mean, in the end all social networks want to be Facebook, right? As soon as there's talk of an IPO or private equity becoming involved you know it's going down the same shithole that Facebook has fallen into.
I've come to the conclusion that enshitification is simply part of Big Capitalism so the only right thing to do is use open protocols like IRC/email or avoiding social networks altogether.
The fact MySpace "accidentally" deleted all their pictures a few years ago is such a loss to internet history. Try looking for images for any music artist that was around during peak MySpace but not now.
> "You could be authentic on MySpace," she says. "Upload raw images, no filters. You could have snot coming out your nose and nobody would judge."
Did that have to do with the website or with the culture of the entire internet? Or maybe the entire world?
I heard a prediction that ultra low production value (e.g. live streaming in a bathrobe) will become a great community building strategy over the next year or two, because nobody would use AI to make themselves look disheveled, therefore they must be a real person, therefore I can trust them.
---
On a related note I'm now seeing everyone's faces being smooth out by weird AI filters. I thought it was YouTube doing it but it seems to be either the person's camera or video editing software. (For example stock footage in the same video often does not have the same plastic skin effect.)
Does anyone know where that comes from? I find it very jarring and I'm not sure if the content creators are even aware that it's being done to their content. I remember an old phone of mine would do it automatically and I had to turn it off.
41 comments
[ 0.24 ms ] story [ 43.8 ms ] threadI met so many cool people in real life I never would have other wise it would be hard to even count.
Great for its time, but with the way the internet is, it will just turn in to another toxic echo chamber.
Next up: Toy Story 7, Andy finds a Sinclair ZX Spectrum in the attic and its missing its 16kb expansion module called Chippy.
I made a fun thing this week for nostalgia:
https://allthedamn.tools/myspace-profile-generator/
The CloudFlare Insights beacon is enabled too. Redacted the page load IDs and timings.
The privacy policy claims these are "privacy-friendly analytics"The favicon also has an odd cache policy "max-age=0" so if you're clicking within a tool that uses #anchor such as the Time Zone Tool each click with a different #anchor triggers a call to this favicon.
The favicon now has a cache header, thanks.
Much of that was made the early web less shit was people being more mentally stable by having most of their social interactions happen for real offline, rather than clinging like Harlow's monkey to a simulacrum of togetherness mediated via a screen like we do today.
Why does it have to be all or none? There’s clearly a demand for this.
For me, the exodus from MySpace to Facebook marks the inflection point were smaller internet communities died and were replaced with services from megacorps.
At the time, MySpace was an echo of free homepage sites on providers like AngelFire and Geocities. My friend group had moved over to MySpace from a custom site our friend hosted on a server in his living room. His web site did pretty much everything that MySpace did, MySpace just did it better.
I don't want MySpace back, but I do want some of the cool interactive content back that seems to all but have died out.
Before that, the web was a mishmash of communities, websites, shops and services. Even instant messengers were way more open and utilitarian, and more like Email: I would use Odigo, Adium or whatever, to use ICQ, AOL, etc. And you just talked with your internet friends.
But when MySpace launched, it was a strange situation where you needed an account, otherwise you weren't seen as "cool" by people you knew from non-online spaces. I was in my 20s and in bands, so not having one was just unacceptable.
After that, there would be those "migrations" where "normies" would follow. Using Email, ICQ or AOL wasn't seen as cool, so you should go to MSN. Myspace wasn't cool anymore, so you had to go to Facebook. And so on and so on. Even techies got into it: having a Hotmail instead of Gmail was seen as a bad thing... and so on.
For me the main thing I miss is Flash. I know there's Ruffle as Flashplayer replacement but the culture around Flash (and most of the authoring tools) has basically died.
(I talked to a bunch of Flash animators I knew back in the day and every single one was surprised to hear that Flash is still available, they just changed the name. Big fail on Adobe's part...)
As for the cute 90s and 2000s web designs, have you seen NeoCities? That spirit is alive and well there :)
The other thing I miss is that everyone would put their email in their form signature and you could just add everyone on MSN. People were super chill in those days, I made a lot of friends that way.
Nowadays the only unsolicited messages I get are from people trying to sell me something.
everything of it you can do with HTML5 & JS nowadays, god thanks! :) (though, compiling "one file and doubleclick" is not that convenient)
PS: not a user, so caveat emptor
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25245740
I'm not a regular user atm, when I used it my experience was great, and the owner is a really nice guy. I vaguely remember him scrambling to update on Twitter when the servers where down while he was at uni etc. For a free service that was exploding in users when he was swamped with other stuff, he always did his utmost to fix things ASAP. So yeah, sign up today and buy merch! You may not end up using the site much but it's for a good cause that sparks joy. And while of course there's also spammers or jerks, there are also lots of nice people to be found there.
Today we have no social networks. Zuckerberg has turned Facebook into.. frankly I don't even know what it is. But it's not about getting updates from your friends. instagram took that place but he fucked that one up too by mutating it into a cheap tiktok clone instead.
Social networks are now just influencer/media produced slob to be consumed by the masses. A Youtube with shorter clips.
It's not an actual social network where you could find out what your friends are up to
I've come to the conclusion that enshitification is simply part of Big Capitalism so the only right thing to do is use open protocols like IRC/email or avoiding social networks altogether.
Because they want their 2007 back. But there is a catch.
Did that have to do with the website or with the culture of the entire internet? Or maybe the entire world?
I heard a prediction that ultra low production value (e.g. live streaming in a bathrobe) will become a great community building strategy over the next year or two, because nobody would use AI to make themselves look disheveled, therefore they must be a real person, therefore I can trust them.
---
On a related note I'm now seeing everyone's faces being smooth out by weird AI filters. I thought it was YouTube doing it but it seems to be either the person's camera or video editing software. (For example stock footage in the same video often does not have the same plastic skin effect.)
Does anyone know where that comes from? I find it very jarring and I'm not sure if the content creators are even aware that it's being done to their content. I remember an old phone of mine would do it automatically and I had to turn it off.